Preceded by Kulturfilm: Around the Statue of Liberty-A Stroll Through the United States (1942). American newsreel footage is used to depict the United States from the point of view of Nazi propaganda. (15 mins, B&W) Titanic might be called a politicized Poseidon Adventure with hilariously inadequate special effects. The disaster film was conceived as a vehicle for anti-capitalist and anti-English propaganda. (Its script dated back to 1940 and paralleled plans for other anti-British hate pamphlets.) Speculators eager to bolster the stock of the White Star Line force the captain of the famous luxury liner to pursue a catastrophic course through icy seas. Offering a cross-section of a doomed community, the film today cannot help but catalyze associations of the fear, panic, and destruction which by that time had become the stuff of everyday German reality. The production itself also seems to have been the site of alcoholic excess and-given the large number of untrained extras-ongoing chaos. Selpin's anti-government utterances during the film's shooting were reported to Nazi officials by scriptwriter Zerlett-Olfenius. The director was imprisoned and liquidated in his cell, although official accounts ruled his death a suicide. In the end, Goebbels deemed Titanic unfit for screening in German cinemas and banned it.-E.R.